Phillipe Wiederkehr

Phillipe Wiederkehr is an undergraduate in Bioengineering Department at UC Berkeley with a major emphasis in synthetic biology. His interest in microbiology is tailocins, which he hopes could be utilized to revolutionize medicine in the future. He is very interested in just how precise bacteria-tailocin interactions are, and how surface proteins on a cell can have counter-intuitive effects on such events. The overall complexity of viruses interests him, and he will be able to contribute to a greater understanding of their interactions with cells.
He assists with phage-related projects. He has done biological research since high school and co-authored a paper on the effects of cannabinoids on the brain that was published in the Journal of Investigative Medicine in 2019. He is also involved with Berkeley iGEM, a club focussing on synthetic and computational biology.
2021 Joshua Jiaqi Huang photo

Jiaqi (Joshua) Huang

Joshua is a graduate student in the Dept. Comparative Biochemistry. He is working with Dr. Ruoshi Yuan on the time-lapse imaging project.

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David Bernstein

As of 2023 David is an Assistant Professor, Electrical and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Vermont. David was a postdoctoral researcher in the Arkin Laboratory at UC Berkeley. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Vermont. He then earned his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Boston University working in the lab of Daniel Segrè where he developed computational approaches to study the metabolic properties of microbes and microbial communities. In the Arkin lab, he focused on combining genome-scale metabolic modeling and machine learning to predict microbial phenotype from genotype. Outside of the lab, David enjoys spending time outdoors skiing (both downhill and cross-country) and hiking.

Luis Ramirez Hernandez

Luis Ramirez Hernandez

Luis was a 4th year undergraduate and aspiring graduate student majoring in Molecular and Cell Biology. He joined the Arkin Lab in the summer of 2019 under the mentorship of Dr. Carim, with whom he studied phage-tail like bacteriocins, also known as tailocins. His first project encompassed designing vectors for the construction of recombinant tailocin proteins in order to investigate genetic determinants of killing specificity. He helped conduct genome-wide fitness assays to elucidate genetic factors of bacterial resistance to tailocins in non-canonical organisms such as Pseudomonas fluorescens and Pseudomonas protegens. When not in the lab, you can catch him with a Nikon taking photos around the city, riding his bike along the marina, playing soccer at the park, or on a hiking trail. Outside of research, Luis is passionate about providing guidance, support, and information to aspiring and current students about the college application process and the college life, especially as it pertains to the experience of first-generation, low-income, undocumented/DACAmented, and LatinX students in higher education. To this end, he actively devotes his time to the Let’s Talk Universi-Tea Podcast – a project created alongside a group of his childhood friends and which is soon to be released.

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Davian Ho

Davian was an undergraduate student interested in bioengineering and EECS. He previously worked on extracellular contractile injection systems, and now investigates phages in the gut microbiome and makes vector art for synthetic biology. Davian also a member of CUBES, where he developed the interface for space resource modeling software.

Nick Nolan

Nick Nolan

Nick Nolan was a Bioengineering and EECS sophomore undergraduate student in the Arkin Laboratory at UC Berkeley; his research topics were in viral engineering and control theory, though is always willing to delve into other topics of interest. As much as science is important to him, science education is equally so–thus he has organized the 2019 BioEHSC™, a Bioengineering High School Competition, the largest high school-specific competition of its kind in the world, as Junior Chair, and looks forward to serving as Senior Chair in the competition’s next annual iteration.

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Omree Gal-Oz

Omree Gal-Oz was a software developer with the Arkin Laboratory at UC Berkeley/ LBNL. Throughout college he was primarily interested in mathematics and music, and found an intersection between them in software. Afterwards he tutored high-schoolers in math and software and taught piano privately before moving to Berkeley to work at the California Jazz Conservatory. He gained experience in software-oriented companies by writing software for Magisto and working on product development with Blue Cedar. He is currently working on integrating biology software into KBase and creating in-browser visual displays. Besides writing software, he still enjoys playing and producing music and can occasionally be found playing music in the wilderness.

MIKA TEI

Mika Tei

Benjamin Adler

Benjamin Adler

As of 2021, Ben is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Doudna Lab at the University of California Berkeley.